Stella Brentwood has led an exotic life for a woman of her time. Her frivolous best friend at Oxford, Nadine, knew early what she wanted: marriage and children. Stella, too, has had her share of passion, but her work as an anthropologist - always the outsider, the observer - was her priority. Now she has decided to root herself in the Somerset landscape. But she finds that village society in England is far more chaotic, more unpredictable, and even more cruel, than any she has known before. And that she cannot - or will not - conform to its rules.